For a moment Lili stood on the stool and simply looked.
The courtyard lay far below, a patchwork of torchlight and shadow. Beyond the walls the town slept under blue roofs; farthest of all, the stone bridge stitched the black water to the mainland's dark line of forest. And farther still—northeast across the sea—lay her homeland. No captain here would carry her back; no one sailed that far north, save for the one time Duke Leo had done so to seize her. It didn't matter. This wasn't about going home anymore. This was payback—pure and simple. If she could not return, she would vanish into the woods and make a new life for herself and her child. Just the two of them.
She glanced at the door—oak thick as a tree trunk, iron bands dull as old moonlight, the little viewing hatch shut. No footfall outside, no low-voiced exchange of guards. They were where they always were: farther down the stair. If she kept silent, they would not come.
Good, she thought. Let the Albion brutes stand there until their beards go white. Winter would be here soon; climbing a tower then would be nearly impossible, and by winter the child would be born. It was now or never. A brave, foolish grin rose before she could stop it. She pictured his face when he found the room empty. Well, it was his own fault for locking a mountain girl in a tower—with an open window.
She could almost see it: Leo, big as a bear, roaring as he flung himself onto that oversized black horse and thundered out to give chase. He'd call her name, swear the sky itself to find her. And if he caught her? Would he do whatever she demanded—or lock her tighter than before? After five months, she could not quite tell.
She pulled herself out of the daydream and leaned from the narrow window again. Below, vines clung to the tower—old and rope-thick. The stone offered a few promising edges and seams. Shoes would only slip; bare feet would find purchase better, and so she kicked off her shoes and went full barbarian, in terms of her feet.
She set her palms on gritty stone, breathed once, twice. "You can do this, Lili. For the baby's future. My child will not be a pawn in a brutish man's game," she whispered—and moved.
She slid onto the deep sill, gathered her skirts high, and dangled her legs into the night. The opening was just big enough. Turning to her stomach, she reached with bare fingertips until they found the vine—thick, woody, braided by years. She tugged. It thrummed and held. Good enough. Her other hand mapped the wall until it found a block proud of its neighbors—half a toe's width. She set one foot there, then the other. Three points of contact—always.
She looked down. The height made the world tilt. Her stomach dropped; her breath hitched. It had been a long time since she'd climbed anything so sheer. Warmth pulsed inside her, calm as a hand on the shoulder—the child's little sun reminding her she was not alone. Her pulse steadied. Her lungs remembered how to work.
She climbed.
Right hand on the vine—yes, it ran all the way down, but she would not trust it with full weight. The left hand read the stone: shallow seams, finger-width cracks, the shadow where mortar had failed. Her feet did the same—seeking nooks for toes, the slight lip where two stones met imperfectly.
A fraction at a time. Hips in; belly to stone; test the next hold; breathe. Then down again.
The wind shouldered the wall and slapped at her cloak. She froze, pressed flat until the gust passed, then went on. Resting meant hugging the tower, letting the burn ease out of her fingers and forearms. Move a hand. Test a foot. Hips in. Breathe. Again.
To an untrained eye her hands were slender, pretty things. In truth, they were mountain hands—sinew braided for work. The months in the tower hadn't stolen her strength. Under the plain wool, muscle quivered and held: legs roped by long miles, abdomen kept firm by quiet drills beside the hearth, back and shoulders taught by years of hauling and climbing. She was rusty at first, yes—and her breasts had swollen with pregnancy, which didn't help her balance—but the body remembers. Leo hadn't noticed the milk; his gaze was always elsewhere, his hands eager and thoughtless on her backside most of all. Her body remembered those touches, how he had taken her to his bed on the ship when they first met and ever since then. Now he would have to do without her, and whether she had ever climbed a tower hardly mattered. Stone is stone and she would climb this tower no matter what.
She froze—cheek and chest pressed to the cold wall, breath shallow in her ribs—as a guard passed below with a torch. Firelight washed up the curve of the tower and briefly limned her shape against the stone, then slid away as the man yawned and kept moving. Who would think to look up, to the inner face of the keep, for a small woman climbing by night?
When darkness folded back, she slid another handspan down the vine, found the next proud edge of ashlar, and eased her weight onto it. The tower's curve moved under her palms like a slow-turning planet.
The coastal wind worried at her cloak, but she did not falter. In the yard the wagon axles groaned as they took on weight. Men worked and complained—backs sore, coin too thin for this hour. Laughter—low and tired—bubbled up anyway. A drowsing sentry started awake when the haft of his spear clonked against his helm; his mates jeered and told him to fetch ale before he toppled off the wall.
Lili glanced down and sneered despite herself. The guards wore iron from crown to calf: kettle helms and nasal helms; mail and splint; pauldrons, vambraces, gauntlets; cuisses and greaves. Only the joints below the waist had small, grudging gaps. Spearheads gleamed in lantern glow; at their hips, swords slept in leather sheaths; shields hung from backs or rested on left forearms—blue-painted, lion-headed, like their tabards. The sight always stung. In her home, a single necklace of bright metal was a treasure; here, men walked around in it like moving fortresses. When the Albion ships had grounded on her tribe's shore, skill and courage had meant little; her people's points and edges had skittered off this metal skin. She was glad she had stepped between them before worse happened.
Warmth moved from her belly into her limbs. The little sun inside did its quiet work—easing the burn from her forearms, unknotting the ache in finger and calf. Where she had expected her strength to run out halfway down, it steadied instead. Focus came too, like the click of a lens finding sharp. Gratitude lifted into her throat. Whatever this child was—hers, yes, and his by blood but not by claim—she would keep the baby far from that man's shadow.
She climbed, and her thoughts walked north.
She pictured home as the wind salted her lips: high plateaus and broken ridges; fjords biting deep into stone; valleys where reindeer threaded the snow like quiet rivers. The land of the midnight sun—where winter skies sometimes danced even at night. Harsh and golden, quiet and alive. Albion's fat fields and easy hills could not match it.
Bells in the town below sometimes sent her backwards into memory: the soft clack of antlers at dusk, the hush of hooves in powder snow. She felt the old tug to see her herd again, to bury fingers in warm winter coats. She saw herself crawling belly-down along a ledge to free a doe wedged in panic, singing nonsense until the small body stilled and trusted and moved. Life had been simple then.
Her fingers numbed—and then tingled back alive. The farther she went, the thicker the vines grew, heavy with late-summer blooms. She tested them and—odd—felt them answer. The warmth in her belly seemed to stir the vine; under her grip the stems tightened like flexing muscle, rough bark biting her skin, holding her weight cleanly. Trust rose from somewhere below thought. She committed: both hands to living rope, feet searching stone, and the plant did not fail her.
Voices gathered at the wagons. The rhythm of loading found its beat: thud, drag, creak, mutter. A sleepy driver barked a laugh at something short and rude. In the gatehouse the captain cleared his throat in the bored way of a man who expects dawn to be as dull as midnight. Lili caught only pieces of their speech, but in five months she'd learned enough to know none of them suspected anything but the usual.
I'm going to make it, she realized, and hope filled her like wine.
Faces rose inside that strength: her mother; her father; three brothers, two sisters; a ring of cousins; and the wider circle around the central fire—hair like straw in winter sun, eyes the glacier left behind: violet, bright, unmistakable. Her people. The place her child must see.
"Don't worry," she breathed into the stone, no louder than wind. "Father, I'm coming. Brothers, sisters—wait for me. Nothing holds me. I am Lili, and the blood of the North runs strong. I'll find my way back. And this child—this miracle—will bring our camp a share of her strength, so the coming winters are gentler."
A pulse answered from the small sun—comfort, resolve, a promise made of light. She took it and let it steel her hands.
Down a hand. Down a foot. Hips in. Breathe.
The tower's great belly curved on; the yard swam a handspan nearer. Somewhere a gull cried in its sleep. The sea turned a page below the bridge.
She did not look down again.
She did not stop.
Finally, her feet found earth—cool grass giving under her toes—just as the wagons jolted and drivers called out to get moving. The inner gate groaned; chains rattled. Two guards stood at the postern inside the arch, watching the wagons' backs and the widening black mouth of the gate.
Thinking fast, she kept low and let the shrubs along the yard wall swallow her. Her palm found a pebble. She flicked it with a snap of the fingers; it rang off a helmet with a bright cling.
"Oi—" the first guard snapped, turning on the second across the arch. The other, who'd heard it too but hadn't seen it thrown, scowled back as if accused. A heartbeat of hostility hung between them. Then the second guard stooped, picked up the pebble, and tinked it off his mate's brow-plate in petty retaliation.
"You—!" Hands rose. Shoulders squared. For a ridiculous second they looked ready to swing.
Lili slid like water into the shadow behind the rearmost wagon, caught the tailboard, and rolled into the bed. The load was light—mostly empty sacks and broken crate-lids; her own light weight added upon it all didn't so much as creak the axle. She wormed under the burlap, flattened herself, and went still.
The teamsters clucked their tongues. Traces tightened. Wheels lurched. The wagon-line creaked forward. Lili realized she'd been holding her breath too long—breathe girl, she told herself and sipped air slowly and silently. Her mind, treacherous and eager, ran all the ways this could go wrong: a spear prodding the sacks; a driver deciding to jump in back; a dog catching a scent; Leo himself riding out of the gate like a storm.
Truth: she'd never fought anyone, let alone a man in earnest, only stubborn reindeer that needed a song and a stern talking to. The idea of striking a giant like Leo was laughable and frightening; she'd probably break her hand on him before he felt it.
But the guards said nothing. No spear jabbed. No dog barked. The wagons rattled beneath the portcullis, under the murder-holes, through the second arch, and out into the cobbled lane. Down they wound past shuttered shops and the brewery's sour breath, past the harbor's tar and salt and fish, toward the far end of town where the bridge began.
Lili lay under the sacks, scarcely daring to believe. I did it. She pressed a hand to her belly. The little light within had gone quiet—asleep, perhaps, after its work.
"Thank you, little one," she whispered. "From here, Mamma will handle the rest."
As the wagons slowed for a turn by the quay, she rolled to the sideboard, slipped over the tail, and dropped to the road with a soft thup. In two heartbeats she was in the drainage ditch, pressed flat among reeds while wheels clattered past. The lantern bobbing at the wagon's rear dwindled, disappeared. Night exhaled.
She rose from the dark and looked back along the road: no alarm, no galloping horse, no blue-tabarded shapes pouring from the gate. Ahead, the town thinned to sheds and paddocks. Beyond, left of the road, fields ran all the way to the river—dark stripes of furrow in rich, black earth, heavy and generous. This island was mostly farmland, she'd learned: wheat and rye and barley feeding people who grew round on the ease of it.
She turned from the town's lamps to the river's sheen. The bridge waited in the near distance, a low gray span of arches stitched with torchlight. Two, perhaps three guards paced there, spears shouldered, breath a pale fog in the moon.
The road was watched. The water was not.
Barefoot, light on the edges of her feet, she slipped along the hedgerow toward the reeds. The river licked softly at the bank as if inviting. Cold or not, she would swim. The tide's pull and a low crawl would take her under the bridge shadow and out the far side to the mainland's dark trees.
She gathered her cloak, tied it at the waist to keep from dragging, checked the knife at her belt, and breathed the night like a promise.
Then she went for the water.